Although his tennis champ/realtor brother Thomas Clark Bundy (1881-1945) was more famous, Charles Leroy Bundy (1875-1953) is Bundy Drive’s true namesake – or else the whole Bundy clan is. The Bundys came to Santa Monica from Ames, Iowa when Charles was just a baby; he grew up to cofound the powerful Santa Monica Land & Water Company, which developed present-day Brentwood. In 1907, he built his home on the corner of Gorham Avenue and Arcadia Street, which was renamed Bundy Drive in 1917. (Los Angeles had annexed the town of Westgate a year earlier, and since L.A. already had an Arcadia Street, this one had to go. Both streets were named after mega-landowner Arcadia Bandini de Baker.) As for Tennis Tom Bundy, he won the U.S. Open three times and married Wimbledon star May Sutton (1886-1975) in 1912. Their daughter Dorothy “Dodo” Bundy Cheney (1916-2014) played competitively into her nineties! Among his other achievements, Tom Bundy subdivided part of Wilshire‘s Miracle Mile, co-owned and subdivided Sherman Oaks with C.C. Albright, and founded the Los Angeles Tennis Club with his wife and G. Allan Hancock.
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